Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2013

Locomotive in Lac-Mégantic derailment had been on fire hours before the crash

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:07

In the 680News round-up of details from the Lac-Mégantic explosion and fire, there’s a fascinating bit of news I hadn’t heard before:

Responding to a reporter’s question during Saturday’s news conference, Lauzon confirmed that firefighters in a nearby community were called to a locomotive blaze on the same train a couple of hours before the derailment. Lauzon said he could not provide additional details about that fire since it was in another jurisdiction.

This may or may not have any bearing at all on the subsequent runaway and crash, but it’s of interest. So far, there have been three reported deaths from the explosions and fire, with at least 40 people still unaccounted for. The PM will be visiting the town soon:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is planning to visit this Quebec community Sunday, one day after powerful explosions caused by a train derailment levelled the town’s downtown core and killed at least one person, with police predicting the death toll would rise.

“We do expect we’ll have other people who will be found deceased unfortunately,” Lt. Guy Lapointe, a spokesman with Quebec provincial police, told a news conference Saturday night.

Authorities in Quebec say two more people are confirmed dead in the train derailment and massive fire in Lac-Mégantic to bring the declared death toll to five.

“We also expect that down the line … there will be more people reported missing than people actually found dead.”

Lapointe refused to give any estimate of people unaccounted for because emergency crews couldn’t reach a two-kilometre-square section of the town out of concern that five of the train’s tanker cars could still explode.

More details on US Army’s re-organization plans

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Strategy Page updates the headline news about the US Army disbanding over a dozen combat brigades in the most recent military cutbacks:

The U.S. Army recently announced its plan to reduce its 45 combat brigades to 32 but to retain most of the combat capabilities of the 45 brigade force. This will be done by transferring many of the troops and equipment from the disbanded brigades to the 32 that will remain in service. This will increase most brigades to 4,500 troops. Each new brigade will have three infantry or armor battalions (instead of two, as most now do) 18 (instead of 16) 155mm self-propelled artillery vehicles (organized into three batteries instead of two) and more engineer troops (the equivalent of a battalion) for each brigade. The new BCTs (Brigade Combat Teams) will initially consist of 14 infantry (two infantry and one tank battalion), 12 tank (two tank and one infantry battalion) and seven Stryker battalions. Three of these 35 brigades will be disbanded over the next few years, but which ones has not been decided yet. By late 2017 the army expects to reduce personnel strength ten percent (to 490,000 troops from the current 547,000).

All this shrinking is due to the fact that the army is facing some hefty budget cuts (at least 5-10 percent over the next decade). Linked with growing costs (for equipment, supplies and wages) makes this cut even larger. For example, over the next decade, defense spending will decline from 3.6 percent to 2.8 percent of GDP. Several years ago the army did the math and concluded that it would have to cut manpower up to 80,000 by the end of the next decade, and reduce combat brigades to as few as 32 (from the current 45) and total strength of 490,000 troops. Without the cuts training would have to be cut to the point where the troops would be unprepared for combat. The recent announcement simply confirms the initial army estimates.

These cuts are nothing new, as army leaders have seen it coming for some time. Four years ago, despite major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army went through a major reorganization. The end result was the increase in the number of combat brigades from 33 to 48 (soon reduced to 45 because of budget cuts). This required the transfer of over 40,000 people from combat-support jobs to the combat brigades. In doing this, the army got some experience in reducing personnel strength without losing capability. Most of this reset was completed, with all the new brigades ready for service, by 2010.

Trying to prevent another “flash crash”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Tim Harford discusses high speed trading and its potential problems:

“High-frequency trading” is a rich environment of algorithms, of predators and prey, all trying to make money by trading financial products at tremendous speed. But the basic proposition is simple to state. When the price of a share rises in New York, the price of related contracts will rise in Chicago just as soon as the news arrives. But if everyone else gets the news on the regular cable, and you’re renting space on the faster cable, you can see into everyone else’s future by (say) 0.7 milliseconds, plenty of time to buy soon-to-rise assets and then, less than a thousandth of a second later, to sell them again.

You don’t have to be a socialist to find this kind of thing discomfiting. There are three concerns. The first is that scarce resources are being spent on high-speed connections that have no social value in what is at best a zero-sum game. The second is that high-frequency traders may be making money at the expense of fundamental investors. The third problem is that such trading appears to introduce systemic risks. The “flash crash” of May 2010 is still poorly understood, which should ring alarm bells — especially since the need for speed means most high-frequency algorithms are simple and therefore stupid.

What, then, should be done? Rather than trying to slow down the algorithms, why not slow down the market? Most financial exchange markets run continuously, effectively assuming that traders can react instantaneously, withdrawing out-of-date offers and replacing them with up-to-the-picosecond prices. It’s this flawed premise — that all trades could be instantaneous — that means that no matter how fast the computers get, there will always be an incentive to go faster still.

A simple way for an exchange to improve matters would be to run an auction once a second, batching together all the offers to buy and sell that have been submitted during that second. Unsuccessful bids and asks would be published and would remain on the books for the next auction, unless withdrawn. One auction a second ought to be enough for anyone; it would deliver a stream of well-behaved data to regulators — currently unable to figure out what is going on — and it is plenty of time for a computer to weigh its options.

Update on the Lac-Mégantic train derailment

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:48

The Guardian provides more recent information about the situation in Lac-Mégantic:

Fires continued burning for more than 24 hours after a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed in eastern Quebec, igniting explosions and fires that destroyed a town’s centre and killed at least one person. Police said they expected the death toll to rise.

The explosions sent residents of Lac-Mégantic scrambling through the streets under the intense heat of towering fireballs and a red glow that illuminated the night sky, witnesses said. Flames and billowing black smoke could still be seen long after the 73-car train had derailed, and a fire chief likened the charred scene to a war zone.

Up to 2,000 people were forced from their homes in the lakeside town of 6,000 people, which is about 155 miles east of Montreal and about 10 miles west of the Maine border.

Quebec provincial police lieutenant Michel Brunet confirmed that one person had died. He refused to say how many others might be dead, but said authorities had been told “many” people have been reported missing.

Lt Guy Lapointe, a spokesman with Quebec provincial police, said: “I don’t want to get into numbers, what I will say is we do expect we’ll have other people who will be found deceased unfortunately. “People are calling in reported love ones missing, some people are reported two, three times missing by different members of the family,” he said.

Lac-Mégantic train derailment update

[. . .]

The cause of the accident was believed to be a runaway train, the railway’s operator said.

The president and CEO of Rail World Inc, the parent company of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said the train had been parked uphill of Lac-Mégantic.

“If brakes aren’t properly applied on a train, it’s going to run away,” said Edward Burkhardt. “But we think the brakes were properly applied on this train.”

Burkhardt, who was mystified by the disaster, said the train was parked because the engineer had finished his run.

“We’ve had a very good safety record for these 10 years,” he said of the decade-old railroad. “Well, I think we’ve blown it here.”

Update: Of course, to a politician, it’s never too soon to turn headlines into props for your favourite causes:

[NDP leader Thomas] Mulcair, speaking in Montreal on Saturday, said the accident was “another case where government is cutting in the wrong area.”

“We are seeing more and more petroleum products being transported by rail, and there are attendant dangers involved in that. And at the same time, the Conservative government is cutting transport safety in Canada, cutting back the budgets in that area,” said Mulcair, who pointed to decreased transportation checks on petroleum at a time when production was increasing.

“When we have a discussion about these things in the coming months or years let’s remember this day. We are watching a magnificent little village being burned to the ground by toxic products that were being transported through it,” Mulcair said.

I really did think better of Mr. Mulcair. This is quite disappointing.

Update, the second: The front page of Le Journal de Montréal, courtesy of Newseum.

Front page of Le Journal de Montréal, 2013-07-07

America’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:36

Rick Falkvinge looks at an interesting appropriate pairing: the former German Democratic Republic’s Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) and the American NSA:

If you were to compare the evil, reprehensible Stasi to the NSA side by side in a visual comparison, who’s the worse surveillance hawk? The people over at OpenDataCity have put together a nice visual guide with astonishing results. We tend to think of Stasi-scale surveillance as the epitome of evil surveillance, and have completely lost track of what today’s governments are doing to their people.

When you go to this page (in German), you are presented with a nice map that compares the size of the Stasi archives — a large building in Berlin — with the corresponding NSA archives. It’s clear that the NSA’s archives — if used with Stasi technology, for an apples-to-apples comparison — would be quite a bit larger:

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Comparison of the Stasi and NSA archives. The Stasi archives were a building in Berlin, the NSA archives seem to be more like a couple of entire blocks.

Keep reading … it’s like a “powers of ten” exercise.

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